 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome to another Wikibon Digital Community event. This one's sponsored by Clumio. I'm your host Peter Burris. Any business that aspires to be a digital business needs to think about its data differently. It needs to think about how data can be applied to customer experience, value propositions, operations that improve profitability and strategic options for the business as it moves forward. But that means ultimately that we're thinking about how we embed data more deeply into our operations. That means we must also think about how we're going to protect that data so that the business does not suffer because someone got a hold of our data or corrupted our data or the system just failed and we needed to restore that data very quickly. Now what we want to be able to do is we want to do that in a way that's natural and looks a lot like a cloud because we want that cloud experience in our data protection as well. So that's what we're going to talk about with Clumio today. A lot of folks think in terms of moving all the data into the cloud, we think increasingly we have to recognize that cloud is not a strategy for centralizing data but rather distributing data and being able to protect that data where it is utilizing a simple, common cloud-like experience is becoming an increasingly central, competitive need for a lot of digital enterprises. The first conversation we had was with Pujon Kumar. Pujon is a CEO and co-founder of Clumio. Let's hear what Pujon had to say about data value, data services, and Clumio. Pujon, welcome to the show. Thank you Peter, nice to be here. So give us the update on Clumio. So Clumio is a two-year-old company. We just recently launched out of Stealth. So far, we came out with an innovative offering which is a SaaS solution to go and protect on-premises VMware and VMC environments. That's what we launched out of Stealth two months ago. We won our best of show when we came out of Stealth in VMware 2019. But ultimately, we started with a vision about protecting data irrespective of where it resides. So it was all about on-premises, on-cloud, and other SaaS services. So one single service that protects data irrespective of where it resides. So far, we executed on-premises VMware and VMC. Today, what we are announcing for the first time is our protection to go and protect applications natively built on AWS. So these are applications that are natively built on AWS that Clumio as a service will protect irrespective of them running in one region or cross region, cross accounts, and a single service that will allow our customers to protect native AWS applications. The other big announcement we are making is a new round of financing. And that is testament to the interest in the space and the innovative nature of the platform that we have built. So when we came out of Stealth, we had raised two rounds of financing, $51 million in series A and series B rounds of financing. Today, what we are announcing is a series C round of financing of $135 million. The largest, I would say, series C financing for a SaaS enterprise company, especially a company that's little over two years old. Well, congratulations. That's going to buy a lot of new technology and a lot of customer engagement. But what customers, as I said up front, what customers are really looking for is they're looking for tooling and methods and capabilities that allow them to treat their data differently. Talk a little bit about the central importance of data and how it's driving decisions at Clumio. Yeah, so fundamentally, when we built out the data platform, it was about going after the data protection as the first use case on the platform. Longer term, the journey really is to go from a data protection company to a data management company. And this is possible for the first time because you have the public cloud on your side. If you truly built a platform for the cloud, on the public cloud, you have this distinct advantage of now taking the data that you're protecting and really leveraging it for other services that you can enable the enterprise for. And this is exactly what enterprises are asking for, especially as they make a transition from on-premises to the public cloud where they're powering on more and more applications in the public cloud. And they really sometimes have no idea in terms of where the data is sitting and how they can take advantage of all these data sources that ultimately Clumio is protecting. Well, no idea where the data is sitting. Take advantage of these data sources, presumably facilitate new classes of integration because that's how you generate value out of data. That suggests that we're not just looking at protection as crucially important as it is. We're looking at new classes of services. We're going to make it possible to alter the way you think about data management. If I got that right, and what are those new services? Yeah, so it's a journey, as I said, right? So starting with, again, data protection, it's also about doing data protection across multiple clouds, right? So ultimately we are a platform, even though we are announcing AWS application support today, we've already done VMware and VMC. As we go along, you'll see us kind of doing this across multiple clouds. So an application that's built on the cloud running across multiple clouds, AWS, Azure, and GCP, or whatever it might be, you'll see us kind of doing data protection across applications in multiple clouds. And then it's about going and saying, can we take advantage of the data that we are protecting and really power on adjacent use cases? There could be security use cases because we know exactly what's changing when it's changing. There could be infrastructure analytics use cases because people are running tens of thousands of instances and containers and VMs in the public cloud. And if a problem happens, nobody really knows what caused it. And we have all the data and we can kind of index it in the back end, analyze in the back end without the customer needing to lift a finger and really show them what happened in their environment that they didn't know about, right? So there's a lot of interesting use cases that get powered on because you have the ability to index all the data, you have the ability to essentially look at all the changes that are happening and really give that visibility to the end customer. And all of this, one click and automating it without the customer needing to do much. I will tell you this, that we've talked to a number of customers of Clumio and the fundamental choice, the Clumio choice was simplicity. How are you going to sustain that even as you add these new classes of services? Yes, that is the key, right? And that is about the foundation we have built at the end of the day, right? So if you look at all of our customers that have, you know, onboarded today, it's really the experience where in less than, you know, 15 minutes they can essentially start enjoying the power of the platform. And the backend that we have built and the focus on design that we have is ultimately why we are able to do this with simplicity. So when we think about, you know, all the things we do in the backend, there's obviously a lot of complexity in the backend because it is a complex platform. But every time we ask ourselves the question that, okay, from a customer perspective, how do we make sure that it is one click and easy for them? So that focus and that attention to detail that we have behind the scenes to make sure that the customer ultimately should just consume the service and should not need to do anything more than what they absolutely need to do so that they can essentially focus on what adds value to their business. Takes a lot of technology and a lot of dedication to make complex things really simple. Absolutely. Pujan Kumar, CEO and co-founder of Clumio. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you, Peter. Great conversation with Pujan. Data value leading to data services. Now let's think a little bit more about how enterprises ultimately need to start thinking about how to manifest that in a cloud-rich world. Chad Kenney is the Vice President and Chief Technologist at Clumio. And Chad and I had an opportunity to sit down and talk about some of the interesting approaches that are possible because of cloud and very importantly to talk about a new announcement that Clumio is making as they expand their support of different cloud types. Let's see what Chad had to say. The notion of data services has been around for a long time but it's being upended, recast, reformed as a consequence of what cloud can do. But that also means that cloud is creating new ways of thinking about data services, new opportunities to introduce and drive this powerful approach of thinking about digital businesses, centralized assets. And to have that conversation about what that means, we've got Chad Kenney who's a VP and Chief Technologist of Clumio with us today. Chad, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, so let's start with that notion of data services and the role the cloud is going to play. Clumio has looked at this problem or looked at this challenge from the ground up. What does that mean? So if you look at the cloud as a whole, customers have gone through a significant journey. We've seen the first shadow IT kind of play out where people decided to go to the cloud, IT was too slow. It moved into kind of a cloud-first movement where people realized the power of cloud services. That then got them to understand a little bit of interesting things that played out. One, moving applications as they exist were not very efficient and so they needed to re-architect certain applications. Second, SaaS was a core way of getting to the cloud in a very simplistic fashion without having to do much whatsoever. And so for applications that were not core competencies, they realized they should go SaaS and for anything that was a core competency, they needed to really re-architect to be able to take advantage of those very powerful cloud services. And so when you look at it, if people were to develop applications today, cloud is the default that you go towards. And so for us, we had the luxury of building from the cloud up on these very powerful cloud services to enable a much more simple model for our customers to consume, but even more so to be able to actually leverage the agility and elasticity of the cloud. Think about this for a quick second. We can take facilities, break them up, expand them across many different compute resources within the cloud versus having to take kind of what you did on-prem in a single server or multitudes of servers and try to plant that in the cloud. From a customer's experience perspective, it's vastly different. You get a world where you don't think about how you manage the infrastructure, how you manage the service, you just consume it. And the value that customers get out of that is not only getting their data there, which is the on-ramp around our data protection mechanisms, but also being able to leverage cloud native services on top of that data in the longer term as we have this one common global index and platform. And what we're super excited today to announce is that we're adding in AWS native capabilities to be able to protect that data in the public cloud. And this is kind of the default place where most people go to from a cloud perspective to really get their applications up and running and take advantage of a lot of those cloud native services. Well, if you're going to be cloud native and promise to customers that you're going to support their workloads, you got to be obviously on AWS. So congratulations on that. But let's go back to this notion of, you use the word powerful. AWS is a mature platform. GCP's coming along very rapidly. Azure is also very, very good. And there are others as well. But sometimes enterprises discover that they have to make some trade-offs. To get the simplicity, they have to get less function. To get the reliability, they have to get rid of simplicity. How does Clumio think through those trade-offs to deliver that simple, that powerful, that reliable platform for something as important as data protection and data services in general? So we wanted to create an experience that was single click, discover everything and be able to help people consume that service quickly. And if you look at the problem that people are dealing with, and customers talk to us about this all the time is the power of the cloud resulted in hundreds, if not thousands of accounts within AWS. And now you get into a world where you're having to try to figure out, how do I manage all of these for one, discover all of it and consistently make sure that my data, which as you've mentioned, is incredibly important to businesses today, is protected. And so having that one common view is incredibly important to start with. And the simplicity of that is immensely powerful. When you look at what we do as a business to make sure that that continues to occur, is first we leverage cloud native services on the back, which are complex and getting those things to run and orchestrate are things that we build on the back end. On the front end, we take the customer's view and looking at what is the most simple way of getting this experience to occur for both discovery as well as backup for recovery and even being able to search in a global fashion. And so really taking their seats to figure out what would be the easiest way to both consume the service and then also be able to get value from it by running that service. AWS has been around, well, AWS in many respects founded the cloud industry. It's certainly Salesforce and the SaaS side, but AWS is that first company to make the promise that it was going to provide this very flexible, very powerful, very agile infrastructure as a service. And they've done an absolutely marvelous job about it. And they've also advanced the state of the art of the technology dramatically and in many respects are in the driver's seat. What trade-offs, what limits does your new platform face as it goes to AWS? Or is it the same colonial experience adding now all of the capabilities of AWS? It's a great question, because I think a lot of solutions out there today are different parts and pieces kind of clump together. What we built is a platform that these new services just get instantly added. Next time you log into that service, you'll see that available to you. And you can just go ahead and log in to your accounts and be able to discover directly. And I think that the power of SaaS is really that. Not only have we made it immensely secure, which is something that people think about quite a bit with having not only data in flight, but data at rest encryption and leveraging really the cloud capabilities of security. But we've made it incredibly simple for them to be able to consume that easily. Literally not lift a finger to get anything done. It's available for you when you log into that system. And so having more and more data sources in one single pane of glass and being able to see all of the accounts, especially in AWS where you have quite a few of those accounts, and to be able to apply policies in a consistent fashion to ensure that you're compliant within the environment for whatever business requirements that you have around data protection is immensely powerful to our customers. Chad, Kenny, chief technologist, Clumeo, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you. Great conversation, Chad, especially interested in hearing about how Clumeo is being extended to include AWS services within its overall data protection approach and obviously into data services. But let's take a little bit more into that. Clumeo's actually generated and prepared a short video that we could take a look at that goes a little bit more deeply into how this is all going to work. Enterprises are moving rapidly to the cloud, embracing SaaS for simplified delivery of key services. In this cloud-centric world, IT teams can focus on more strategic work, accelerating digital transformation initiatives. But when it comes to backup, IT is stuck designing, patching, and capacity planning for on-prem systems. Snapshots alone for data protection in the public cloud is risky, and there are hundreds of unprotected SaaS applications in the typical enterprise. The move to cloud should make backup simpler, but it can quickly become exponentially worse. It's time to rethink the backup experience. What if there were no hardware, software, or virtual appliances to size, configure, manage, or even buy at all? And by adding enterprise backup, public cloud workloads are no longer exposed to accidental data deletion and ransomware. At Clumeo, we deliver secure data backup and recovery without any of that complexity or risk. We provide all of the critical functions of enterprise backup, de-dupe and scheduling, user and key management, and cataloging. Because we're built in the public cloud, we can rapidly deliver new innovations and take advantage of inherent data security controls. Our mission is to protect your data wherever it's stored. The Clumeo authentic SaaS backup experience scales on demand to manage and protect your data more easily and efficiently. And without things like cloud bills or egress charges, Clumeo gives you predictable costs. Monitoring global backup compliance is far simpler and the built in, always on security of Clumeo means that your data is safe. Take advantage of the cloud for backup with no constraints. Clumeo, authentic SaaS for the enterprise. Great video. As we think about moving forward in the future and what customers are trying to do, we have to think more in terms of the native services that cloud can provide and how to fully exploit them to increase the aggregate flexibility both within our enterprises, but also based on what our suppliers have to offer. We had a great conversation with Woon Jung, who is the CTO and co-founder of Clumeo about just that. Let's hear what Woon had to say. Everybody's talking about the cloud and what the cloud might be able to do for their business. The challenge is there are a limited number of people in the world who really understands what it means to build for the cloud, utilizing the cloud. There's a lot of approximations out there, but not a lot of folks are deeply involved in actually doing it right. We've got one here with us today. Woon Jung is the CTO and co-founder of Clumeo. Woon, welcome to theCUBE. Happy to be here. So let's start with this issue of what it means to build for the cloud. Now, Clumeo has made the decision to have everything fit into that as a service model. What does that practically mean? So from the engineering point of view, building a SaaS application is fundamentally different. So the way that I'll go and say is that at Clumeo, we actually don't build software and ship software. What we actually do is build service and service is what we actually ship to our customers. Let me give you an example. In the case of Clumeo, they say backups fail. Like software sometimes fails and we get that failure too. The difference in between Clumeo and traditional solutions is that if something were to fail, we are the one detecting that failure before our customers do. Not only that, when something fails, we actually know exactly why it failed. Therefore we can actually troubleshoot it and we can actually fix it and upgrade the service without the customer intervention. So it's not about the bugs also or about the troubleshooting aspects, but it's also about new features. If you were to introduce a new feature, we can actually do this without having customers upgraded but we will actually do it ourselves. So essentially it frees the customers from actually doing all these actions because we will do them on behalf of them. At scale. And I think that's the second thing I want to talk about quickly is that the ability to use the cloud to do many of the things that you're talking about at scale creates incredible ranges of options that customers have at their disposal. So for example, AWS customers have historically used things like snapshots to provide a modicum of data protection to their AWS workloads. But there are other new options that could be applied if the systems are built to supply them. Give us a sense of how Coomil is looking at this question of you know, snapshots versus something else. Yeah, so basically traditionally even on the on-prem side of the things you had something called the snapshots and you had your backups, right? And they're fundamentally different. But if you actually shift your gears and you look at what AWS offers today they actually offers the ability for you to take snapshots. But actually that's not a backup, right? And they're fundamentally different. So let's talk about it a little bit more what it means to be snapshots and a backup, right? So let's say there's a bad actor and your account gets compromised like your AWS account gets compromised. So then the bad actor has access not only to the EBS volumes but also to the EBS snapshots. What that means is that that person can actually go ahead and delete the EBS volume as well as the EBS snapshots. Now, if you had a backup let's say you actually take a backup of that EBS volume to Clumio that bad actor would have access to the EBS volumes. However, it won't be able to delete the backup that we actually have in Clumio. So in the whole thing, the idea of Clumio is that you should be able to protect all of your assets that being either on-prem or AWS by setting up a single policies. And these are true backups and not just snapshots. And that leads to the last question I have which is ultimately the ability to introduce these capabilities at scale creates a lot of new opportunities that customers can utilize to do a better job of building applications. But also I presume managing how they use AWS because snapshots and other types of service can expand dramatically which can increase your cost. How is doing it better with things like native backup services improve a customer's ability to administer their AWS spend and accounts? Great question. So essentially if you look at the enterprises today obviously they have multiple on-premise data centers and also a different cloud providers that they use like AWS and Azure and also a few SaaS applications, right? So then the idea for Clumio is to create this single platform where all of these things can actually be backed up in a uniform way where you can actually manage all of them. And then the other thing is all doing it in the cloud. So if you think about it, if you don't solve the problem fundamentally in the cloud there's things that you end up paying later on. So let's take an example, right? Moving bytes, moving bytes in between one server to the other. Traditionally, basically moving bytes from one rack to the other, it was always free. You never had to pay anything for that. Certainly in the data center. Right, but if you actually go to the public cloud you cannot say the same thing, right? Basically moving bytes across AWS regions is not free anymore. Moving data from AWS to the on-premises that's not free either. So these are all the things that any cloud provider or service provider like us has to consider and actually solve so that the customers can only back it up into Clumio but then they actually can leverage different cloud providers in a seamless way without having to worry all of this cost associated with it. So Clumio, we should be able to back it up but we should be able to also offer mobility in between either AWS, backup VMware or VMC. So if I can kind of summarize what you just said that you want to be able to provide to an account to an enterprise, the ability to not have to worry about the backend infrastructure from a technical and process standpoint but not also have to worry so much about the backend infrastructure from a cost to financial standpoint that by providing a service and then administering how that service is optimally handled the customer doesn't have to think about some of those financial considerations of moving data around in the same way that they used to. Have I got that right? Absolutely, yes. Basically multiple accounts, multiple regions, multiple providers. It is extremely hard to manage. What Clumio does it will actually provide you a single pane of glass where you can actually manage them all. But then if you actually think about just the manageability it's actually you can actually do that by just building a management layer on top of it. But more importantly, you really need to have a single data repository for you, for us to be able to provide a true mobility between them. One is about managing but the other thing is about if you're done in the right way it provides you the ability to move them and it leverages the cloud power so that you don't have to worry about the cloud expenses but Clumio internally is the one that actually optimizing all of this for our customers. Woon Jung, CTO and co-founder of Clumio thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks very much Woon. I want to thank Clumio for providing this important content about the increasingly important evolution of data protection and cloud. Now here's your opportunity to weigh in on this crucially important arena. What do you think about this evolving relationship? How do you foresee it operating in your enterprise? What comments do you have? What questions do you have of the thought leaders from Clumio and elsewhere? That's what we're going to do now. We're going to go into the crowd chat and we're going to hear from each other about this really important topic and what you foresee in your enterprise as your digital business transforms. Let's crowd chat.